Tag: privacy

Within the past three days, I’ve deleted roughly a quarter of my “friends” from Facebook. Over the years I’ve accumulated a number of them – people I went to high school, college, and grad school with, people I worked with or collaborated with on projects, people I met briefly on my various travels, and people I honestly didn’t know at all.

Facebook has evolved a lot since its first incarnation. I know, because I’ve grown up with it. Facebook was released the year I became a freshman in college, and at the time, it connected you to a small network of your classmates. Now, thirteen years later, it can connect you with the world, providing followers with an intimate glimpse into your thoughts and private life.

Despite accumulating more than 1500 “friends” on Facebook, the actual list of people who are fundamentally important to me is pretty small. In my real life, I don’t talk to a single person I went to high school or college with. When I go visit my hometown, I usually tell only my mom and two of my childhood friends. Aside from them, the people I keep in touch with by phone are almost exclusively people I worked with or went to grad school with, and I can count them on my fingers. Many of my closest friends aren’t even on Facebook anymore, and those that are tend to share very little.

I ended up with 1500 “friends” the way anyone who is social and nomadic can. I grew up in a decent sized town and went to a decent sized college, and have worked a lot of different jobs in different places. I traveled a lot, moved a few times, and went to many different conferences and workshops where I met a lot of people. When I worked for NatureScapes and was heavily involved with NANPA, photographers would connect with me that I did not know and had never met before, but as a brand ambassador, I accepted their friend requests, compromising my personal privacy to help build the brand and connect with potential clients and collaborators.

I’ve wanted to cull my friend list for a while. Facebook doesn’t make it easy – there is no easy way to go through your list of friends in a stagnant order (such as alphabetically) – but devising some trickery I was eventually able to search my whole list and begin the process. I unfriended the people who used fake profile names when I could no longer remember what their real one was. I unfriended people I plainly didn’t recognize and had no idea who they were or why I had connected with them in the first place. If I couldn’t recall how I met someone, or if I met a person only once years ago at a conference or workshop and never communicated with them since, I unfriended them. If they were someone who I knew but never really talked to – people who lived on my floor in college freshman year, friends of friends who I only saw with those other friends – they got axed. The same with significant others of friends and friend’s exes who weren’t really friends of mine. I unfriended people who had died, the parents and siblings of friends whom I knew but didn’t have any relationship with, and most accounts that had been deactivated. I unfriended just about anyone I had never met face to face in real life – the few who I kept were those I would recognize in person and want to grab dinner with based on mutual respect and common interests. A few of those I unfriended were talented photographers, so if possible, after unfriending them I followed them or their photography pages instead. I deleted high school and college classmates whom I had little interaction and no shared memories with. When people had duplicate profiles, I figured out which one had the most recent activity and deleted the other.

I unfriended anyone who had ever made me feel threatened, like the older male photographers who offered to take me on photo trips with them and the people I hardly knew who used Facebook as a platform to stalk, offend, attack, and demoralize others or whose actions repeatedly made me feel uncomfortable, upset, or angry. I unfriended annoying people when social niceties didn’t prevent me from doing so – the people who only interacted with me when trying to sell me a product from their multi-level marketing scheme or encourage me to vote for them in some stupid contest. If I felt unfriending them would result in unnecessary drama because we lived in the same town, worked in the same place, or had mutual friends, I just unfollowed them instead.

After all of this, I still have 1130 of the 1500+ friends I accumulated in the past dozen years but I suspect many more will go in the days, weeks, and months to come. Facebook has become an easy outlet for sharing photos and life’s moments, but I really don’t care if someone I met at a conference knows what color I painted my living room. More important things like relationship updates or additions to the family are things I’d prefer to keep more private, and Facebook’s ever changing features and privacy policies make it difficult to continually regulate who can and can’t see specific things you post.

I no longer accept friend requests from people whose names I don’t recognize and have never met face to face. I operate a Kari Post Photography Facebook page and post my work there instead of on my personal private page, yet I still regularly get friend requests from photographers. I deny every single one. This has been my routine for several years now, and it’s clear to me that posts on my personal profile get more views and likes thanks to Facebook’s algorithms that hide posts from pages to discourage engagement. I don’t care. If the cost of getting my work seen by more people is sharing personal moments of my private home life with strangers, I’m not interested.

To see my photography on Facebook, feel free to check out and like the Kari Post Photography page. When you “like” and “follow” the page, you can opt to see posts in your news feed first (you can adjust your notifications by hovering over the “Follow/Following” button) which will ensure you don’t miss anything, as the default setting allows posts to fall off your news feed quickly. The more you visit and engage with my page, the more relevant posts from it will show up on your newsfeed. If you actually want to connect with me for professional reasons – to collaborate on a project, get together and shoot, etc – you can send me a message through my Facebook page or if you prefer, find me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the platform I prefer to use for networking and professional connections, and if you send me a message, I’m happy to connect with non-friend photographers there.